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Although this meditation upon mortality may soon induce in us a sense of
anguish, it fortifies us in the end. Retire, reader, into yourself and
imagine a slow dissolution of yourself--the light dimming about you--all
things becoming dumb and soundless, enveloping you in silence--the
objects that you handle crumbling away between your hands--the ground
slipping from under your feet--your very memory vanishing as if in a
swoon--everything melting away from you into nothingness and you
yourself also melting away--the very consciousness of nothingness,
merely as the phantom harbourage of a shadow, not even remaining to you.
I have heard it related of a poor harvester who died in a hospital bed,
that when the priest went to anoint his hands with the oil of extreme
unction, he refused to open his right hand, which clutched a few dirty
coins, not considering that very soon neither his hand nor he himself
would be his own any more. And so we close and clench, not our hand, but
our heart, seeking to clutch the world in it.
A friend confessed to me that, foreseeing while in the full vigour of
physical health the near approach of a violent death, he proposed to
concentrate his life and spend the few days which he calculated still
remained to him in writing a book. Vanity of vanities!
If at the death of the body which sustains me, and which I call mine to
distinguish it from the self that is I, my consciousness returns to the
absolute unconsciousness from which it sprang, and if a like fate
befalls all my brothers in humanity, then is our toil-worn human race
nothing but a fatidical procession of phantoms, going from nothingness
to nothingness, and humanitarianism the most inhuman thing known.
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